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Measuring & Mapping

Where, how far, and how much? People have invented an astonishing array of devices to answer seemingly simple questions like these. Measuring and mapping objects in the Museum's collections include the instruments of the famous—Thomas Jefferson's thermometer and a pocket compass used by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their expedition across the American West. A timing device was part of the pioneering motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800s. Time measurement is represented in clocks from simple sundials to precise chronometers for mapping, surveying, and finding longitude. Everyday objects tell part of the story, too, from tape measures and electrical meters to more than 300 scales to measure food and drink. Maps of many kinds fill out the collections, from railroad surveys to star charts.

This stem-winding watch was made by E. Howard and Company of Boston, Mass. The firm was an American pioneer in building the high-quality stem-winding watches that replaced key-wound watches in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Company founder Edward Howard began a clockmaking business in 1842, branched out into watchmaking about 1850 with partners in what would eventually become the American Watch Company in Waltham and then left to form his own watch company in 1858. Howard retired in 1881, but the firm carried on under various names until the early 21st century.

This is one of the earliest watch movements manufactured in the United States. Made at what eventually became the Waltham Watch Company, it is part of the firm’s third run of watches in Roxbury, Massachusetts, about 1853. The movement bears the serial number 531 and the name Samuel Curtis, one of the firm’s first investors.

In the 1850s, watchmakers at the firm began to develop the world's first mass-produced watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on special machines. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs of watches. Although it would be well into the 20th century before the watch industry achieved a very high level of interchangeability, the Waltham designers started the innovations that would eventually lead there.

Launched in 1849 in a corner of the Howard & Davis clock factory in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the company’s early years were financially unsteady. The company name changed repeatedly as investors came and went. Operations moved from Roxbury to Waltham in 1854, where the company settled, optimistically poised for expansion, on a tract of land with nearly 100 acres. The watchmakers at Waltham helped spawn an American industry that by 1880 had ten firms making nearly three million watches a year.

From its infancy, timekeeping has depended on astronomy. The motion of celestial bodies relative to the rotating Earth provided the most precise measure of time until the mid-twentieth century, when quartz and atomic clocks proved more constant. Until that time, mechanical observatory clocks were set and continuously corrected to agree with astronomical observations.

The application of electricity to observatory timepieces in the late 1840s revolutionized the way American astronomers noted the exact movement of celestial events. U.S. Coast Survey teams devised a method to telegraph clock beats, both within an observatory and over long distances, and to record both the beats and the moment of observation simultaneously. British astronomers dubbed it the "American method of astronomical observation" and promptly adopted it themselves.

Transmitting clock beats by telegraph not only provided astronomers with a means of recording the exact moment of astronomical observations but also gave surveyors a means of determining longitude. Because the Earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours, longitude and time are equivalent (fifteen degrees of longitude equals one hour).

In 1849 William Cranch Bond, then director of the Harvard College Observatory, devised an important improvement for clocks employed in the "American method." He constructed several versions of break-circuit devices—electrical contracts and insulators attached to the mechanical clock movement—for telegraphing clock beats once a second. The Bond regulator shown here incorporates such a device. Bond's son Richard designed the accompanying drum chronograph, an instrument that touched a pen to a paper-wrapped cylinder to record both the beats of the clock and the instant of a celestial event, signaled when an observer pressed a telegraph key.

This is an example of the "new theodolate" for which Rowland Houghton (about 1678-1744), a Boston mechanic, received a patent from the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts in 1735. This was the second patent for a mechanical invention issued in the British colonies of North America. The patent did not describe Houghton's instrument, but stated simply that it was designed "for surveying of lands, with suitable instruments, with greater ease and dispatch than any surveying instrument heretofore projected or made within this province." The only other contemporary reference to this instrument appears in Houghton's 1737 advertisement for aqueducts, which states that "Said Houghton has lately improv'd on his new Theodolate (sic), by which the art of Surveying is rendered more plain & easy than heretofore."

The horizontal circle is graduated to degrees and numbered in quadrants. One side is also numbered from VI to XII to VI, as for a sundial. The sight vanes for the alidade are missing. The compass card—marked "J. R. LINCOLN, BOSTON”—is a 19th-century replacement.

When the Smithsonian acquired this instrument, it was the only known surviving example. Another example, however, has recently come to light.

During the Civil War Army physician Dr. G. D. O'Farrell received this watch as a gift from grateful patients.

In the 1850s watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, developed the world's first machine-made watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on specialized machines invented just for that purpose. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs.

In its first decade, the firm's work was largely experimental and the firm's finances were unsteady. The name of the company changed repeatedly as investors came and went. Operations moved from Roxbury to Waltham in 1854, and the Panic of 1857 brought bankruptcy and a new owner, Royal Robbins. Reorganization and recovery began, and output reached fourteen thousand watches in 1858.

Renamed the American Watch Company the next year, the firm was on the brink of success from an unexpected quarter. During the Civil War, Waltham's watch factory designed and mass-produced a low-cost watch, the William Ellery model. Selling for an unbelievable $13.00, these watches became a fad with Union soldiers. Just as itinerant peddlers had aroused the desire for inexpensive clocks, roving merchants sold thousands of cheap watches to eager customers in wartime encampments. By 1865, the year the war ended, William Ellery movements represented almost 45 per cent of Waltham's unit sales.

This William Ellery model watch was a gift to Army surgeon G. D. O'Farrell from his patients at White Hall, a Civil War hospital near Philadelphia. The inscription on the dust cover of O'Farrell's watch reads: "White Hall USA Gen'l Hospital, Feb. 15, 1865 Presented to Dr. G. D. O'Farrell, USA by the patients of Ward C as a token of regard & respect for his ability as a surgeon and unswerving integrity as a man."

This compass has a heavy brass bowl gimbal mounted in a wooden box and a flat card with central buoyancy. The inscriptions read "E. S. RITCHIE BOSTON 23924" and "PATENTED" and "RITCHIE, BOSTON U.S.A." The Ritchie ledgers, now held by Ritchie Navigation, indicate that it was made on May 7, 1898, and sold to T.S. & J.D. Negus, a New York firm that sold a variety of nautical and optical instruments.

This compass has a turned wooden bowl gimbal mounted in a wooden box. The inscription reads "S. THAXTER MAKER No 27 STATE STREET BOSTON." It was made between 1813 when S. Thaxter moved to No. 27 State Street, and 1822 when the firm became S. Thaxter & Son. The donor believed that it had belonged to his distant ancestor, Simon Mellon, and was used in a whaling vessel in the Bering Sea.

This compass has a turned wooden bowl gimbal mounted in a wooden box. It probably dates from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The inscription reads "C. R. SHERMAN & Co. NEW BEDFORD." Charles R. Sherman (fl. 1865-1905) sold instruments and other items for nautical use.

Edward S. Ritchie of Boston developed the first successful liquid compass in 1862 and introduced several improvements over the course of the next two decades. This is the model for Ritchie’s third patent (#38,126) dated April 7, 1863. Three features should be noted. The magnetic needle is enclosed in an air-tight metallic case and, with the card, is very nearly the same specific gravity as the liquid. The needle float is in the form of crossed cylinders. And an elastic chamber compensates for the unequal expansion of the liquid and the bowl.

The U.S. Patent Office transferred this compass to the Smithsonian in 1926. Attached to the compass is a Patent Office tag that reads: "No. 38,126 E. S. Ritchie. Mariner’s Compass. Patented Apl 7th 1863."